


Nom de Plume: A Tale of Magnus the Red

by Rens_Knight



Category: If The Emperor Had A Text To Speech Device, Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-18 12:01:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28991844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rens_Knight/pseuds/Rens_Knight
Summary: Deny it as he will, Magnus the Red has been left with alotof baggage to deal with after his run-in with a pack of hungry crotalids during a Warp jump without a gellar field.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 25





	Nom de Plume: A Tale of Magnus the Red

**Author's Note:**

> Although I'm playing the events he goes through (mostly) straight in this story, this story comes from the universe of _If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device_ by the awesome Bruva Alfabusa on YouTube, and is therefore NOT FUCKING CANON. Oh, yeah...and this being the TTS-Verse, there is a whooooooole lot of swearing.

_The mad hallucination relented. The ship rematerialized back around them. Well, Magnus_ hoped _so--one little psychic nudge here and there to make absolutely sure...perfect. Inasmuch as 'perfect' had any meaning in a world literally just about ruled over by Chaos._

_The Captain-General of the Adeptus Custodes--otherwise known as Little Kitten--sputtered. "...what? Wha--what?"_

_"And here we are!" Magnus announced, throwing on an air of false chipperness. Maybe he'd get lucky and the man's memory of the Warp would fade like waking up from a dream. "See, told you it'd only take a few seconds!"_

_"But didn't...your head...the...didgeridoo...?" Ohhhhh, shit. He_ did _remember. Play it cool, Magnus, play it cool..._

_The Half-Daemon Primarch rolled his eyes, carefully tuning his psychic aura to radiate nonchalance. Not that Kitten was a psyker, but still. "What in the world are you prattling on about now?"_

_The armored Custodes deflated. Magnus felt more than a little twinge of regret, but pushed it down. "I'm...just going to lie down for a bit," he mumbled. "Been a day, and all."_

_"Go do that, Companion," Magnus replied. "I'll stay here and make sure the ship returns to Terra with all haste!"_

_Kitten slunk out of the room._

_The Blood Raven shouted from inside the Ultramarine containment box. The one Magnus had put him in, while in the warp. "Brother, I am PINNED here--"_

_That did it. Magnus just...snapped. Before he could loose his irritation on the sons of his gene-seed any further than he already had, he drew in a deep, hissing breath. "Aaaaaugh...ooooookay..."_

_Then he drew in the power of the Warp and teleported himself away in a flash._

  
  


Yeah...it was not one of Magnus' proudest moments. And Magnus had _not_ gone to the ship's bridge. Or to engineering. Or to _anywhere_ useful, in fact.

Magnus the Red had gone to his room.

True, he had a lot more to be ashamed of in thousands of years of screwing up than that, but that certainly didn't change the fact that he hadn't exactly been Mr. Nice Primarch back there. Leaving one of his (unofficial) Astartes stuck in that toilet-seat-covered psychic containment box had been kind of a dick move. True, Kitten would probably figure out how to get him out of there eventually, but still, Magnus knew it should've been him, undoing what he'd done while they were stuck in the Warp.

And Kitten...what was that ancient term for what Magnus had just done to _him_ , pressuring him into believing they hadn't shared that messed-up reality during their Warp transit?

Gaslighting. That was the word.

Kind of like trying to force an _entire galaxy_ of humanity to believe there was _nothing_ beyond the perceptions of the usual five senses, all the while knowing full well there was, and having the nerve to slap that sack of crap with the label of 'Imperial Truth.' Of course Father Bag-of-Bones hadn't been stupid enough to totally deny everything to his psyker son, but he hadn't exactly given him any solid _reasons_ as to why one had to be careful pursuing the powers of the Warp, either.

At least Father had had something truly horrific to be afraid of, when you considered the Ruinous Powers and their bloody, rotting, conniving, sadomasochistic designs on the Materium.

What did _Magnus_ have to fear back there, exactly?

 _Fear_ wasn't even the right term at all, especially when you compared that little reality-hiccup with watching your psycho brother who was _way_ too into that whole otherkin thing for anybody's good lift his leg and piss fire over your _whole planet_. Or literally getting your soul drained out of your body by the very being who promised to protect you from the insanity of said brother and half your fucked-up little family and fix the little problem of nearly all your sons getting turned into literal mindless shells of armor with no souls on board except when they did battle. Compared to that--nope, nothing to see here, just a few angry critters crossing the Warp looking for a new planet to chow down on.

Except for the fact that there very much _had_ been something to see while they were busy tripping in the Warp, and Magnus the Red could remember every excruciating little detail. He'd put on quite a show in there, hadn't he?

Bad enough that some strange little eddy of the Empyrean had turned him into a bizarre, hyper-Prosperan parody of himself with way more balls than sense, and everyone else around him had kept their heads intact, both figuratively and literally. (At least emerging from the Warp had erased the evidence of crotalid chomp-marks around his neck, but still.) _That_ wasn't the worst of it at all, though. Not by far, as far as Magnus was concerned.

Nope. The worst had happened before all that, right when the very first of the crotalids showed up.

He'd jumped out of his skin.

Needless to say that had never happened to him as a Daemon Prince of Tzeentch, not even when He, Cato Sicarius, most FUCKING ANNOYING Space Marine of the Holy Latrine Cover, showed up with his buddies and that containment box on Sortiarius to kidnap him back to Terra during the after-party for the sacking of Fenris.

Screaming like a little girl instead of a ten-foot titan of testosterone wasn't the problem though. Unlike Daddy Dearest, who was born of the souls of ten, twenty, or fifty-thousand prehistoric shaman-psykers and like them, remained convinced even at the ripe old age of one hundred thousand that girls were icky, Magnus was totally fine with women. Not like he got to hang around with them much--if at all, and even then the Emperor's genetic meddling meant he didn't feel any need to jump their bones (or anybody else's, for that matter). But he certainly didn't have anything against them. It wasn't _their_ fault the Big Bone Bag hadn't seen fit to figure out how to make them part of his supposed Master Vision.

So what _was_ the problem? He hadn't just jumped out of his _skin_. He'd jumped out of his _feathers_ and _sqauwked_.

Just for shits and giggles, Tzeentch had stuck him back in his avian Daemon Prince form the last time they ran into each other. Which meant when that crotalid showed up, he did exactly what birds do. The crimson down that covered him fluffed out. The enormous matching feather crest on his horned head stood on end. And his great huge parrot wings had flapped out of pure desperate instinct, trying to take flight and get out of the way, before he'd...well...did that whole 'naturalist' performance of his count as 'getting hold of himself'?

Still, it was better than _that_.

He knew _exactly_ what was going to happen when Daddy Disastrous got a look at this. The chicken jokes, the constant bird references, the endless mockery of his psyker son for getting himself in this situation, would NEVER. FUCKING. END.

The Emperor had _never_ given shit to Sanguinius for _his_ wings, of course. He'd been all too happy to take advantage of his faaaaaaaavorite son's angelic appearance (allthewhiletotallyclaimingnottobeANYkindofdeityonpainofdeathcoughcough) and dote on his 'FUCKING PERFECT HAWK BABY' right up till the very end.

Mind, Magnus didn't particularly have it in for Sanguinius himself--not the way he did for Leman FUCKING FURRY Russ. Magnus was sharp enough to realize Sanguinius didn't exactly ask be Joseph of the Technicolor Coat o'Feathers. He wouldn't even complain _that_ much if someone found a way to resurrect his slain brother...Emps _had_ at least bothered to do the favor of getting his soul free of Tzeentch, which _was_ probably the first time the old skeleton in Terra's closet had ever put Magnus' needs first, even if it _did_ take ten whole millennia real-time to get around to it.

Rather it was the fact that, as usual, if it weren't for double standards, the rotting lich wouldn't have any standards at all.

It had been the same with Angron, hadn't it? The old Imp had been perfectly happy to let Corvus Corax finish out his revolution against the oppressive regime that ruled over Lycaeus, but nooooooooo, it _could not fucking wait_ when Angron and his fellow gladiator-slaves finally stood on the cusp of breaking his own tormentors on Nuceria. The Emperor had just snapped Angron up to space knowing full Chaosdamn well...and knowing _Angron_ knew full Chaosdamn well...it meant the slaughter of all his comrades and the total destruction of everything he'd ever stood for on his homeworld.

Yep, made _perfect_ fucking sense, according to whatever half-assed Master Plan the Emperor was running on, never mind the consequences! And to think his father had dared to call _him_ a shitty GM when they'd played that fantasy role-playing game. The Emperor had tried to GM an entire _galaxy_ and look where that got him, and everybody else who had to live with the ten-thousand-year fallout.

Magnus knew _exactly_ which side he was on with Father--the bad side. Which of course was _all_ his sides when the flesh had decayed off of them long ago, but still.

And now that the Emperor had the power to talk to his subjects again, thanks to that text-to-speech device, it was just about _all_ he ever did. And he'd apparently been storing up a full library of all humanity's best swear words and insults to deal out on...well, everyone and everything, true, but _especially_ his own family and Magnus in particular. So yeah...Magnus knew he was in deep chickenshit (he could hear the smartass remarks already) when he got home.

Fuck. He could feel goosebumps again, doing what they did on actual geese. He realized he was starting to floof up _again_ at the thought of his father's gleeful, monotone mocking of his misery.

Magnus tried to pace it off, his bare talons clicking on the deck in his room. Ugh. That made his crest sit back down, at least (as much as it ever did), but it certainly didn't get his mind off of anything. Just another reminder--hell, his digitigrade gait in and of itself was yet _another_ reminder--of Tzeentch's latest round of fuckery.

The ire rose up in him again. It was almost as if Tzeentch had seen fit to remind him that even though Magnus had his soul back out of the God of Change's clutches, that didn't mean he was free of problems--far from it. Hah. Maybe the old creep thought he was doing Magnus some kind of _favor_. Or maybe not. Who the hell ever knew? Trying to sort it out just made Magnus' head hurt.

Magnus decided he might as well lower his hypocrisy levels just a bit lest they approach those of the Emperor, and stalked his way out into the corridor to see if he could, in fact, find something useful to do like he'd assured the Captain-General he would.

Well, at least the good thing about a ship built to carry Space Marines and Primarchs and other such ridiculously outsized beings was that even in this state--horns, wings, and all, he still fit through doors, no problem. So he had _that_ going for him. That was something.

He heard voices down the hall--sensed their owners, too. They sounded a good bit calmer now, well...inasmuch as Indrick and Apollo _ever_ got anywhere below veins-popping-out-of-their-necks level.

"Are you SURE we can trust him?" one of them--he could never tell which--was asking Kitten. "He IS some sort of Chaos-spawn."

Magnus froze just beyond the archway, out of the three men's sight. His stomach sank.

"He put me in a BOX." There was the other one just now. "A big, dark TIME-OUT BOX. In the middle of the WARP. And LEFT me there, until you showed up."

"It's all right, boys," Kitten...well...purred. "Your father Magnus isn't _all_ bad. Did you know he exposed a horde of xenos imposters posing as the High Lords of Terra? And he banished a raging band of Inquisitors who were trying to kill the Emperor into the Warp. I don't agree with everything he does...a lot more lately, to be completely honest with you. _But_ I've come to see over time that even if we go our separate ways and the Emperor will have me back on Terra even though I abandoned my post, that Magnus' heart seems to be in the right place. Maybe it always was, even...back then."

Damn...he'd be losing a hell of an ally if the Captain-General _did_ eventually part ways with him. He'd try his best to head that off for as long as he could, but still. It stung, even with the compassionate undertone to the man's words. This night was going on a whole other kind of hell-ride straight down Shit Creek.

"But what about the HORNS? The WINGS? He has the MUTANT taint of Chaos--"

"Well, there's no denying he's been through some traumatic stuff," Little Kitten replied, "and that it's left its mark. But--" The Custode's voice perked up. "You'll perhaps be interested to know I took the liberty of having the ship's cogitator perform some genetic tests on a bit of fluff I found on the floor. There's some stuff I don't recognize, to be sure, but the cogitator _did_ get a few rather prominent hits on some genes from known organisms from Holy Terra."

"And?"

"I got matches for _Cicinnurus respublica_ , _Paradisaea decora_ , and _Paradisaea rubra_ , to name the most dominant ones. They actually came in quite a bit more prominent than the raptorish sort of stuff you might have expected, or even the unknowns."

"WHAT does that MEAN?"

"Here, come take a look." Magnus still kept himself well out of sight, but he couldn't help sneaking his psychic perceptions around the corner to see for himself as Little Kitten offered up a dataslate. What he saw...it about took his breath away.

"We've very little in the way of records on these creatures," the Captain-General was saying. "As a group they were called the birds of paradise. As far as I can piece together, they all vanished before the Dark Age of Technology even truly set in. There's no place in the modern galaxy to clone them for them to live again, as far as I know. Certainly not on Holy Terra, of course, and not on any other world I can imagine. They belonged to an environment without large predators, and even in the ancient days there were few such places, and in the end they were not hidden from Man.

"An awful shame, for as you can see from these pictures--"

He thumbed through image after image of resplendent avians, preening and displaying a rainbow riot of plumes streaming far off their bodies without any real care in the world. They _were_ gorgeous, delicate creatures indeed, the utter opposite of anything one might call a Primarch, especially one fixed into the body of a Daemon.

"They were truly majestic animals," he concluded. "They belonged to a time and place that lies far out of our reach. And in a way...your father Magnus is the last of their species. So...go a bit easier on him, perhaps?"

Magnus withdrew his psychic presence and slipped back down the hall and into his room before anyone had a chance to see, and suspect they'd been heard.

A hint of moisture gathered at the corner of his good eye as he caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror, the great plume of crimson feathers forming the great crest that burst forth from his head and trailed halfway down his back. He sat down at the edge of his bed, drawing his wings about him, seeing the ornate black and cyan flight feathers anew.

Could it really be true, what Kitten said? Did Magnus the Red, in his half-daemon form, really bear the last legacy of such creatures, so alien to the grim reality of their decaying galaxy?

The Emperor--anyone else--they'd say what they may. He'd never convince them otherwise. Some days he would still struggle to convince _himself_ otherwise.

But at least now, _he_ knew.

**Author's Note:**

> The idea that Magnus the Red (in ANY universe) is part-bird of paradise, and has further avian features beyond his wings and talons, is my own invention but I hope you still enjoy it. :-)


End file.
